[O]ne of the stated purposes of school integration was to bring black students up to a level close to that of white students. But, to the great disappointment of everyone, the results of this theory worked exactly in reverse of its intended purpose, and instead of black students rising to the educational levels previously attained by white students, the white students dropped to the level of black students. To make matters worse the lack of discipline and ambition of black students soon became shared by their white classmates, and our educational system has been in a steady decline ever since.

Alternatively racist whites, who could afford it, pulled their kids out of public schools because of integration. As a result a generation of white kids grew up with no connection to such an important part of the community. So when the children who were pulled out had kids of their own they became less likely to put their kids in the public school system and thereby became uninvolved with them. Also when those parents became voters they voted to cut funding to the public schools.

Parental and community engagement in schools are proportional to funding and funding is proportional to outcomes.

Darn, I submitted this quote and I could have sworn I checked every single entry before mine... Oh well. I think I didn't see this because I quoted Salon and spelled Hubbard's name with his title, Arkansas Lawmaker Jon Hubbard.

What is he talking about? IQ scores and SAT/ACT scores of students has generally gone up over the past 40 years when you look at individual demographics. It goes down slightly when you lump all demographics of students together because more low-income kids and kids from single-parent households finish school than they did decades ago. The white student dropout rate was near 10% back in the 80s and the black student dropout rate was near 15%. Now the white rate is down to 5% and the black rate down to 8%.

However, US education scores have definitely gone down subjective to the scores of other industrialized nations in the past 30 years. That is due mostly to other industrialized countries' scores going up and thanks mostly to deregulation of school curriculum and standards (like the "No Child Left Behind" Act) & Republicans (and Democrats to a lesser degree) slashing education funds for the past 30 years to free up more money to spend on the military and corporate welfare.

China, one of the countries with the best education marks, spends 4% of its entire GDP on education. The US spends less than 0.8% of its GDP on education.